Our Wish List
Since 2008, the Google Ads experts at Torchlight Marketing have written an open letter to Saint Google and other platforms we use to craft our clients’ content. We believe that at least one of Saint Google’s Elves or maybe even the big SG himself reads our blog because we have gotten lots of things that have been in our letters. Regardless, we find this to be a fun tradition for a company that eats, lives, and breathes Google Ads. So here are our 2023 Christmas wishes:
1. Tab for Negative Keywords in Search Query
We have been advocating this since our first Dear Saint Google letter in 2008, and if you’re in this industry, we’re sure you have been too. The idea is simple – report to the advertisers the search queries they lost because of a negative keyword. Negative keywords are one of the most powerful Google Ads features, but great power comes with great risk. The risk is that you remove traffic you want, and once you do this, the system is silent. Inside the logic of Google Ads, there is a piece of code that jumps out when it matches a negative keyword. All we want is to know is that it happened. This request has been around for so long that we no longer need a “report”, we need an entire “tab”.
2. SEO Wizard
We service many clients and consult many small businesses who come to us with questions about SEO. They know that Google reins king when it comes to bringing them organic traffic but these small businesses have no idea what they can do to improve page rank. We would love to see an SEO wizard that would give SEO tips as verbose and helpful as Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool.
3. Google Product Health Check
One of our company’s biggest strengths is being able to provide our clients with the information to see how well Google views their website including their Google Business Profile. However, this takes lots of different tools and can be time consuming. One of our wishes from old St. Google would be a Google Product Health Check– an easy-to-read report that enables business owners to see how Google perceives the usage and inclusion of its different assets (Google Search Console, Google Analytics, YouTube, Google Tag Manager, etc.). This report would help tell them what they’re doing right and what needs to change in the eyes of Google. Sometimes Google wants us to be mind readers, but this is an area we would prefer not to be.
4. Easier Access to Social Media Profiles on GBP
Your Google Business Profile should be the one-stop-shop for all things contact information about your business: your website, phone number, hours of operation, etc. At the bottom of some GBPs there are links to that business’s social media profiles, however these are much harder to obtain thank you’d think. Ultimately, it is up to Google to make the connection between your business (your GBP) and your social media profiles. There is no field in the GBP dashboard to input these yourselves. With all of the mighty power that Google holds, we wish there was an easier and quicker way that Google can verify a business’s social media profiles and add them to their GBP.
5. Grade the GDN
The GDN (Google Display Network) is massive and poorly documented. There are millions of sites on the GDN however no indication of how good a site it is. Does it have a lot of traffic? Is it easy to navigate? Is it frequented by real people or just internet crawling robots? Creating grades of A, B, C can help those who use Google Display Network know what type of sites their ads are being displayed on. A is the top 5%, B is the next 15%, and C is the unwashed masses. Sites should be allowed to file for an A or B ranking, and if they get it, they are rewarded with more revenue. This review should cost money to apply for and include a review of performance.
6. Daily Budget Controls
Budgets have rules that not everyone understands, and sometimes it makes it difficult to control the account properly. If you get behind on the daily budget, Google Ads will attempt to catch you up by increasing the budget by up to 2x the daily budget on any given day. It does this by multiplying the daily budget by the number of days in the month. This new budget is compared to the current monthly spend. The new budget is always in Google’s best interest but not always in yours. We want the budget to be the budget and only sometimes we want the catch-up. This needs to have a control for the catch-up percent allowed.
While we could ask for a few more things, we don’t want to be too greedy. Our wish list is filled with tools and items that we believe would not only make marketers’ lives earlier, but make the internet a better place. So with that, from everyone on the Torchlight Marketing team, we hope you have a very merry holiday season!